Sean Bagshaw is a photographer well known for his expedition and adventure images as well as his popular online tutorials. Tiffany Reed Briley interviews him on a variety of topics and gets him to offer some advice you can use to improve your images

Sean Bagshaw

Thank you very much for chatting with us, Sean. I’m eager to get started, so let’s jump right in. I believe you have a background in education. Can you tell us a little about that and how you entered into photography?

Sure! I was a middle school Science and Math teacher for over a decade and loved that career. It was a great thing to do, but really hard work. When my wife and I had our own kids (my wife was a teacher as well), we realised how much we had put into our teaching careers. When we had kids, we found how difficult it was being parents and teachers for the kind of job we wanted to do for both. So after years of trying to juggle being a dad and a teacher, and feeling I wasn’t doing my best job with either one, I started looking for other things to do.

I had been doing photography as a fairly serious hobby for many years. It started not really as an art, but as documentation. When I was in my 20-30s I had done a lot of climbing and mountaineering. I picked up photography to document those trips. As the expeditions grew, we had sponsors and folks wanting us to tell the story of what we were doing. I ended up being the team photographer on those trips because I enjoyed it and was willing to carry the extra gear ...